OPENING ROUND
In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a 23-year-old lieutenant in the British Army’s Royal Artillery, began working on a new type of ammunition that in time would revolutionize warfare and enshrine him in the annals of military history. Three years later he successfully demonstrated his “spherical case shot,” which he intended to be used as an antipersonnel weapon, at the British fortress of Gibraltar. Shrapnel had essentially married the canister shot, in use since the 1400s, with the delayed-action fuze, allowing an artillery shell to be fired intact into enemy positions, where it would detonate and explode in midair, showering debris at a high velocity in front of—or above the heads of—the enemy’s troops. Shrapnel’s invention more than tripled the effective range of canister shot (from about 1,000 feet to more than 3,500…